I really love Hubspot’s keyword grader seo tool as a quick and easy tool to improve On-Page SEO.  It’s all about placing the right keywords in the right places on each of your web pages.  Essentially, if there is a ranking war with you and another company to come up  for a search on Google, you will win if you have your pages optimized better than your competition.  So let’s get started and use Keyword Grader.

 1.  Find your keywords.  You will need to populate a list of 200-500 key words that are relevant to your business.  Ask yourself: what are the words that my prospects search for to find me?  Google your competition.  See what words they are using. 

2.  Now, begin to load those words into the Keyword grader.  Keep adding as many words that you think make sense to your business.  Use the keyword suggest tool to come up with variations.  This is very helpful and a fast way to populate your list.  Be sure to also add derivatives for words for singular, plural and geographic location if you are trying to reach local traffic as well.

3.  Once the words are loaded, rate each word according to relevance to your business.  Keyword Grader asks you to rate them from 1 to 5 in importance.  Once you have those marked, mark all of your 5’s as your favorites. 

4.  Now that you have your words loaded and ranked according to relevance, it’s time to review the metrics of the Keyword Grader to see how you can use this information to your advantage.  Keyword Grader tells you how many searches were made per month on each word you selected; how difficult this word is to rank for on the first 10 pages of Google; if your site is currently being found for this key word; and the approximate Cost Per Click of each word. 

If you’ve loaded your competitors’ website into the mix already, you can see where they are ranking as well.  Wow! This is really powerful information if used correctly!

5.  Now that you have your Keyword Grader loaded, sort by your favorites.  Examine these words you selected based on the above criteria discussed.  Ultimately, you are looking for words that are highly relevant to your business, but also not exceedingly difficult to rank for.  

6. Here’s where long tail words come into play.  If you’ve got a long tail phrase (lower search volume but more targeted to your business), make this one of your favorites.  If you see insanely competitive terms, you may want to retool your list and remove them, or make them lower in relevance.  The idea here is to focus your campaign on key words that you can optimize your content and pages around that will increase your SEO. 

7.  Great, now that you have the list, you will need to use it to optimize your website pages.  Create a document for yourself for quick review.  Hubspot makes this easy with an export into Excel or Word.  Using this document, you will begin to make changes to your website.  It’s easy if you are using Hubspot’s CMS.  Just log in and go to Page Manager.  There you will see where to add in Page name, title, url, keywords and description.  Take your keyword list and add those words here.  If you aren’t using Hubspot’s CMS, you can still do the work in the Marketer version and direct your web master to implement the changes.

8.  Quick note:  This can be a tedious process based on the number of pages you have on your site.  Don’t get bogged down and overwhelmed.  Just prioritize your pages and do them one by one.  Remember, the more pages you have, the better.  Google will crawl your site more often if you have consistently fresh and updated content.  And if the web pages aren’t optimized, no one is going to find you.  So this is a really critical step!

9.  Now that you’ve optimized your pages, you can still continue to use Keyword Grader on a regular basis.  Check back to search for new keywords before you launch a new inbound marketing campaign and/or add new pages to your site. 

10. Congratulations!  You have successfully used the Keyword Grader.  Now it’s time to build links so you can improve your rankings for those competitive keywords.  But that’s for another day and another blog post.  Stay tuned for “How to Rank for Competitive Keyword Phrases with HubSpot’s Link Grader Research Tool” in my next article.
 

And finally, if you love Hubspot Keyword Grader and Inbound Marketing concepts, but don’t have the time to do it yourself, geneatePR is here to help.  Outsource your Inbound Marketing efforts.  We’ll help you make your campaigns successful!

Wendy DeFeudis